After Fair Play: the tool for the household’s email, calendar, and facts

What Fair Play names

Fair Play, published in 2019 by Eve Rodsky, is a framework for renegotiating household labour between two partners. Four ideas do most of the work.

• CPE: conception, planning, execution. The carrying partner does the conception and the planning even when execution is handed off. The imbalance hides because only execution is visible to the household.
• The card system. A deck of 100 cards representing household responsibilities, from “groceries” to “tooth fairy”. Each card has one owner who holds it from start to finish, not a relay where one person hands execution to the other after doing the thinking.
• The four rules. Take ownership of full CPE per card. Set fair, clear expectations once. Communicate respectfully. Reclaim time for what each of you uniquely gives the world.
• The reframe. There is no “default” parent if every card has an owner. The word “default” is doing the work, and the book takes it apart.

What Hermo handles

• Familypedia. The household’s facts in a knowledge base both partners can query from WhatsApp. Health insurance number, school details, the dentist’s number, the policy reference, the password the cleaner needs. Whichever partner is at the doctor’s surgery isn’t the one who has to interrupt the other to get the number. Either partner asks, either gets the answer.
• Automatic extraction from email and forwarded messages. The school newsletter, the medical confirmation, the camp registration email: dates and tasks land on a shared calendar without anyone having to copy and paste. The planning layer stops being a manual transcription job someone has to remember to do.
• Watchers. The part of conception that’s about timing. World Book Day on Thursday becomes a costume task on Tuesday evening, not a panic on Thursday morning. Half-term camp emails that arrive in February become a “book before places fill up” nudge in March. On Friday, the weekend watcher surfaces three local options for Saturday, so the weekend has a shape before anyone wakes up.
• WhatsApp as the interface. No app to install, nothing new to learn. That matters because any system that requires the less-engaged partner to adopt a new tool is a system that won’t get used in practice. Both partners talk to the same Hermo in the chat tool they’re already in.

A morning in a household running through Hermo

It’s 7am on a Monday. The school’s weekly newsletter has just landed in the inbox. Among ten other things it mentions World Book Day on Thursday and notes that costumes are encouraged. Priya skims it making breakfast. By 9am, in a work meeting, it’s gone from her head.

In a household running through Hermo, the same email gets read on arrival. By 7:05am a calendar event for Sophie’s World Book Day sits on the family calendar both parents already use. A “find or make Sophie’s costume” task sits on the shared family list. On Tuesday evening the watcher pings WhatsApp: the costume task is still open. Tom sees it in the same chat thread he checks fifty times a day. He picks it up. No verbal handoff between Priya and Tom was needed. The planning was handled in software, before it ever reached Priya’s head.

Other books that put words to it

• What’s on Her Mind, Allison Daminger. The academic research underneath the framework.
• How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids, Jancee Dunn. The relationship-cost version, more practical than theoretical.

Frequently asked questions

Is Hermo a Fair Play app?

No. Fair Play is a framework for renegotiating who owns which household responsibilities, card by card. Hermo doesn’t model card ownership or take a position on what should be redistributed. It operates one layer below: it reads household email into a shared calendar, holds the facts both partners need in one place either can query, and surfaces things before they become a problem. The conversation about cards stays yours. Hermo just makes the information underneath that conversation accessible to both of you instead of resident in one head.

Is Hermo affiliated with Eve Rodsky or Fair Play Life?

No. Hermo is an independent product. We reference Fair Play because many of the parents Hermo is built for have read it and recognised themselves in it. There is no commercial relationship, licensing arrangement, or endorsement between Hermo and Eve Rodsky or Fair Play Life.

Does Hermo do the 100 cards?

No. There’s no card system in Hermo and no UI for assigning ownership. Tasks and events that Hermo extracts land on a shared family list and the family calendar, visible to both partners; either of you can pick something up or check it off.

Can AI help share the cognitive household work between partners?

Partially. The mental load of running a household has two components: the operational layer (what’s coming up, what needs doing, where the information lives) and the negotiation layer (who owns what, what counts as fair, who gets time back). Hermo is built for the first. It reads household email into a shared calendar, holds household facts in a knowledge base either partner can query in WhatsApp, and surfaces upcoming items before they become a problem. The second layer, who owns which card, stays a human conversation; books like Fair Play are the tool for that one.

Who in our household sets Hermo up?

Whoever currently has the most household context. Hermo connects to one Gmail inbox to read household email, and both partners use WhatsApp to talk to it. Once it’s set up, either partner can capture, query, or act.

Will my partner actually use it?

Hermo lives in WhatsApp, which both of you already check many times a day. There’s no app to install and nothing to learn. The partner who has historically been less engaged with household-admin systems engages, because using Hermo looks like sending a WhatsApp message, which is something they already do.

What does Hermo need access to?

A Gmail connection through Google-audited OAuth, and WhatsApp for the conversation interface. Hermo doesn't send email, reply to anyone, or delete anything from your inbox. Hermo also doesn't read your WhatsApp chats: WhatsApp is the channel where you talk to Hermo, not a source it reads in the background.